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Twitter Writer: Tan Wai Jia
Photo credit: Christopher Tan
As the nurse sat me down on the wheelchair at the Emergency department of the hospital, one thought resounded in my head: How could this have happened?
I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense. I had been fit. I had trained sufficiently. Just a few hours ago I had been in the midst of my last training session for an upcoming triathlon, smoothly eating up the road on my bike. Now, that lean and mean triathlete had been reduced to a hobbling, bent-over girl with a humiliating pain in her groin.
It was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my life. I could barely stand. How could this have happened?
As it turned out, many of my inner thigh muscles had suffered grade two tears. All my hamstrings had been ripped as well. And six weeks later, they found a fracture on my X-ray, caused by the over-vigorous contraction of my hamstrings pulling on my pelvic bone that day.
Almost five months have passed since then. These five months have been a time of depression, frustration and denial, but also soul-searching and revelation. My most frequent prayer was that God would reveal to me the lessons He wanted me to learn through this grueling period of waiting and recovery. And one sports medicine doctor, two podiatrists and three physiotherapists later, I finally understood more about this little-known injury.
“Your muscles are severely imbalanced,” said my third physiotherapist (The first two weren’t confident enough to take up my case). I was blessed to have finally found her—she had done a research paper on this particular sort of injury. “Looking at how you move, I can tell your core is very weak. Your flat feet also cause excessive strain on your medial thigh muscles. All this, plus your unstable pelvic tilt and too much training, resulted in an injury of this severity. It was only a matter of time before you injured yourself-this muscle imbalance was a ticking time-bomb inside of you.”
At that moment, I understood the lesson God was imparting to me. Balance, child, balance. All my life I had had the habit of plunging head-first into anything I was passionate about, throwing myself 110 percent into any new endeavour; sometimes, unknowingly, I left little reserve for God. So unsurprisingly, after having learned how to cycle at the embarrassing age of 21, I’d picked up the triathlon sport within a few months and become a serious road-cyclist, giving the sport my all.
I hadn’t known it at the time, but triathlon was taking more of me. I still guarded church time religiously, but I knew that the sport was insidiously rivaling the Lord. Training was utterly time-consuming. I was often tired in class. It felt like my precariously balanced universe was slowly being overturned, yet I wasn’t even aware of it.
That same day, on the Pilates mat during physiotherapy, as my face scrunched up in agony, my physiotherapist said, “This is hard work, isn’t it? See, you’re actually doing a lot of work from a posture of rest! You’ve been doing too much cardiovascular work, and not enough strength training in your core. Now, we’ve got to work on balancing all your muscles so you don’t injure yourself again.”
A weak core. Was this injury a reflection of my spiritual state as well? I loved to do things for God, loved to engage in community work, church ministry, etc., but had I indulged so much in running around and getting caught in the fanfare that I had neglected building up my spiritual core? I learnt then that in the same way the body needs a strong physical core to use its muscles efficiently for rigorous sports, so too must we maintain a strong spiritual core to exercise our ministry muscles effectively. A careful balance must be maintained. We need to learn to work from a posture of rest, constantly building a strong foundation and a strong core upon His word. Too much running around results in burnout… or injury.
Later, as I did more research, I learnt that the classical history of a patient suffering from this injury was the young female athlete with a history of anorexia. I hadn’t realised that my historically imbalanced nutrient absorption (during my illness) had also contributed to my fracture. A bone scan done three months later confirmed that I had osteopenia—a common complication of anorexia.
And so I learnt that a balanced diet is of vital importance for physical health, just as a well-balanced spiritual diet of church, cell group, and individual quiet time is essential to nourish one for ministry. I also learnt that I needed to learn to moderate my passions, be careful of going to extremes, and maintain my poise through the narrow gate.
Today, I am still on the road to recovery. Last week, when I ran my first short run since the injury, I could feel that I was running with much better posture and much greater efficiency. All that hard work in core strengthening and muscle-balancing exercises had paid off.
A balanced life is what we need to run the race strong. Let’s finish the race set before us, injury free.
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
—2 Timothy 4:7
